Graphics 1, the first of several chapters covering graphics programming and topics have been released. This is the first chapter of a spinoff miniseries based off of the OS Development Series. This chapter covers general graphics concepts, some hardware concepts, VGA BIOS interface, and more.

I would argue that description of CRT is misleading. There arnt 3 "different coloured beams of electrons". There are 3 beams specifically designed to hit different colours of phosphours on the screen. Then again, I might just be being picky.

in the CDA section, you say

The CGA only supported a Color Palette of 16 colors, because it was limited to 4 bytes per pixel.

Should this be 4 bits per pixel? 4 bytes per pixel is 4 billion colours.

Hey, I'm so happy, i was waiting for that tutorial for a long while I'm very waiting for the next PS : When the Sound's integration comes ?PS2: What about the FileSytem ? Can't wait ofr that too Thanks so much ~Mike~ for your great tutorial

This is a little off topic but how do you enter V86 mode. I want to implement automatic shutdown but in order to do so, I want to us the real mode APM interface (accessible through APM). I have tried before but it has always resulted in an immediate triple fault.

Ecoboy, what I did for filesystems is base off of the Windows file system method. So I have CD and DIR. OS DEV WIKI has some good references to the FAT filesystem (the main series has good ones too).

For sound, I would look into PCI first. It is actually fairly simple. There are only two registers for PCI and they are simple to use. The problem with sound cards is that they are often not standardized. That's why they come with driver cds. You might be able to figure out how it works on your computer but you would be throwing away portability. Contact the card's manager if you want details.

PCI is also a good way to get 100% control of the video card. VGA is great and easy, but it limits you to low resolutions and few colours. If you can figure out your graphics (they are less standardized than the Sound card), you can have graphics just like Windows.

If you haven't already, look into PCI. You can use it to access almost all deivces from Ethernet cards to Video Cards to USB. USB is also interesting but painfully long. The 2.0 specification is 600 pages long. On top of that there are the 3 interfaces that you need to implement.

On the topic of graphics, when will the next Graphics tutorial come out? It has been almost a year. HAVE FUN